Having people I love spread across the landscape like dandelions gives me some delightful opportunities.

I get to taste regional foods, hear unfamiliar dialects that claim to be English, and visit places and sights I”d never imagined. I also get to “experience” natural disasters of every variety and description.

I have eaten in Waffle Houses, where hash browns come “loaded.” Don”t ask, just eat.

I have visited grandchildren in schools where “Bubba” is a name and not a bad joke.

I”ve been to places where the sun shines so rarely that children”s playgrounds are all indoors, and to others where a “pleasant” summer temperature is only 105 degrees.

I”ve also been in communities where “a fer piece” is an actual measure of distance that has meaning to the locals although I don”t know what it is.

One of my sons, who I believe actually loves me, once took me to a public eatery where I was afforded the opportunity to “shuck and suck” a bucket of “mud-bugs,” which are called crayfish where I come from.

All of these adventures in climate, culture and cuisine are amusing interludes that make good stories, but it is the less cheerful side of the ledger that has morphed the last of my dark brown locks into the silver shade of fatherhood.

If you have kids and grandkids spread across every corner of the compass, pure random chance means there is always something ugly happening near somebody. Sometimes the ugly effects hit even if the ugly thing is a fer piece off.

I have children who don”t live anywhere near the sea coast, who found themselves in severe flooding when a river of mud, generated by torrential downpours from a hurricane 400 miles away, filled their garage and basement.

Right now I have a grandson living in Chile. When an earthquake of significant size hit off the central South American coast last week, I leaped to immediate panic. With some effort, I beat the panic into a more rational level of concern. The fact that nothing bad happened in his neighborhood didn”t keep me from behaving like a crazed grandpa.

A couple of weeks back, the phone rang and the grandson”s daddy called. The first words out of his mouth were, “I knew you would be worried, so I called to tell you we are all OK.”

While I have an enormous talent for unjustified worry, I hadn”t had this branch of the family on my worry-radar — maybe because I had been away from the weather news.

“Dad, we had four massive tornadoes just four miles from the house.” This particular son and his family have lived in Louisiana, Georgia and now Oklahoma. Tornadoes follow him like little lost puppies, but these puppies aren”t anybody”s idea of cute and cuddly. The most recent were in the F4 category twisters. Recently I”ve had a chance to get a little panic-payback.

On two successive Wednesdays tornadoes have whistled around my section of Northern California.

This is a place where a 35 mph wind is a big deal. Winds that whip around in little tight circles and try to carry Dorothy”s farmhouse to Oz are almost unheard of.

Since I tend to check on my offspring at the drop of a little earthquake or a minor flood, I knew the Aylworth family mob would hear about our atmospheric anomaly and immediately rush to check on us, or on their mom at least.

Not a phone call. Not a peep. Apparently family panic is a one-way street.

Roger H. Aylworth is a staff writer with the Enterprise-Record. His column appears every Sunday and he can be reached by email at raylworth@chicoer.com. Autographed copies of his book “A Place in the Shower Schedule, 101 Favorite Columns,” can be purchased at the newspaper office, 400 E. Park Ave., Chico.